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Howdy, New Readers! Thanks for reading Exiern!
Written by Scott T. Hicken with art by Antipus, the comic updates Mondays.
Please check out the Archive to enjoy the earlier adventures of Typh and Peonie!
Exiern contains mature themes and is best for readers 18+.
Be a Producer! Your name/title with an optional SFW hyperlink will be posted prominently HERE following the close of the month! You’ll also receive monthly mailings from Exiern’s author, Scott T. Hicken!
Want to help Exiern run independently, and even increase how often we post a month? Check out our Patreon page for early access and bonus stuff!
Discussion (23) ¬
This entire story would make an amazing D&D campaign…
The story line with the dragons and their fate-worse-then-death and if Alicia got it, reminds me of the dresden files Outsider possesion/persuasion but only on a lighter note
Does this mean that more happened to Faden here than he let on? I think it’s quite possible!
http://www.exiern.com/2007/12/13/blindfold-operations/
I guess this also means that this inner voice here was never the dragon Collective then. Factional split or a whole different non dragon entity? I guess the later seems likely and possibly even one of those past powerful beings like the Travelers, Beyonders or others …
http://www.exiern.com/2008/06/01/alicia-final/
Finally about some plan to render Typhan-Knee retroactively non-existent. Fits with the ever shifting Ether continually altering people’s past. This is both in small ways (the colour of people’s pants) and large ways (making said persons sisters not only disappear but never have been).
Also, multiverses where things branched off differently!
The decision not to summon a demon:
http://extra.exiern.com/comic/dark-reflections-05/
Also in effect led to Typhan-Knee not existing as Tiffany here is for all intents and purposes a completely different person at least for now.
http://extra.exiern.com/comic/dark-reflections-04/
You know, the fact that Alicia is so far along in her transformation to dragon that she has scaled and no longer has hair would likely also mean that she would have lost her breasts by now. Those 38 DDs look so wrong on a lizard woman.
Wait what? Faden is finally gone for good?
Which ‘collective’ are they talking about? And why would a world without Typh or Tiff be a better one? And for whom would it be better for?
All these answers, to be questioned in the next instalment of Exiern 😛
I’m figuring that Alicia must have tortured him when she killed the guards in the forest, that’s when she had best access. I can’t see how she got past the representatives of the Authority to get into Castle Grayfang (?) where he was imprisoned and then back out again.
On the subject of Faden, he seemed to know a lot about our world. They may well have started as metatextual references but once he started saying things to Peonie about alarm clocks and then that she wouldn’t know what they are; as well as other characters referring to things like Wookies and then straight away wondering why they said it, I think our world is a real alternate dimension just like the Dark Reflections Universe.
I’m hoping one day there’s a story (or spinoff might be better to not create a tonally jarring narrative in the main story) where the gang has to travel into our world for a while (for reasons). Maybe even as a reluctant truce with Faden since he seems to know our world (and may even have been to Euro Disney).
Instead of the usual bewilderment at our modern day technology, it could be potentially funny if they grasp the concepts of our world really quickly and if anything show up our relative lack of self sufficiency having lived in a modern society. Anyway, that April Fool’s Day/Month showed that potentially something along those lines *might* work and be rife with comedic potential I suppose …
3 guesses who’s talking to her (would having Typhan-Knee not exist really prevent that girl from dying?)
If you look at who’s talking to Alicia at the end of “Alicia’s Story” and this page, you’ll see they have the exact same type of distinctive speech bubble as they do here. Definitely a clue and I don’t think it’s Cytx; in fact if Cytx is now the new DOOM guy (also, his speech bubbles are different), doesn’t that mean he’s now the new narrator at not supposed to interfere (at least past the point of being in the way and a public nuisance)? Or is it just that they have chosen up to now not to interfere but there’s never been anything to stop them.
Anyone know how much clicking the ads makes per click for a site like this? I’ve turned off my adblock and click most of them (I actually do read most of them as I have actually picked up some interesting stuff – draw the line at any of those dating sites though). I’m hoping by now I’ve at least made them a dollar.
In other news, just to see what might happen as Top Webcomics reset their counter for the new month, for a bright shining moment (lasting all of two minutes), I managed to get Exiern: Dark Reflections to the Number 2 spot. I guess it was appropriately pipped for the Number 1 spot by something called Grrl Power. Obviously now that normal voting patterns for the others have reset themselves, it’s not quite as high any more.
Finally, recommended this story and Dark Reflections to a very high profile commenter at the AV Club who’s our resident expert in this area and invited him to give an opinion, so I hope you’re all going to be on your best behaviour if he drops in.
If you make someone never was, how will you, in your shiny new continuity, have any knowledge that you need to do it? If you don’t then you return to the original continuity where you do it again, returning to the new continuity where you don’t know…
Tiff’s current existence strongly suggests ultimate failure for any attempt at destroying her, even before we consider that he/she’s the protagonist of the webcomic, which we really can’t considering how Meta this comic has gotten in the past.
Depends on what version of the multiverse they’re using I guess. If someone from an alternate world or timeline can be observing and influencing things from there and hence still aware of before and after the changes. Also, there’s the discontinuity principle where at least some entities (if they’re powerful enough at least) can retain memories of the world before and after the changes.
Then there’s the fact that it’s been established that the past is in a continuous state of flux anyway, which is why technically speaking there’s no such thing as a continuity error in this story.
@chaucer59: It’s funny that even though it’s obvious when you think about it, until now, I’d never questioned the presence of breasts on non-mammal females in comics and illustration. I think they are so prevalent that we don’t even notice, even though they are prominent 🙂
Wow Faden Escaped! And being Tortured by Dragons…
Tiff will be so upset…… she missed it!
Nef said:
“I’d never questioned the presence of breasts on non-mammal females in comics and illustration. I think they are so prevalent that we don’t even notice, even though they are prominent”
Given the present beliefs about the origin of dragon myths*, it should be no surprise that mammalian features are included, because their progenitors in the human mind were semi-deities, who could change the weather, the rivers, and even cause earthquakes. Changing body parts is minor compared to that.
* There are two major dragon myths, with one source. Those are the eastern “Chinese dragons”, or “lung”, and the western concept of dragon. Their source is the Hindu concept of the semi-divine “Nagas”, who controlled the monsoons, and thus the floods of rivers. They were depicted as like unto King Cobras, , but far larger, who were protectors of infant rulers and a symbol of power.
As this concept moved up the east Asian coast, those aspects remained, and multiplied, so that there are “Hai Lung”, sea dragons, and Mountain dragons, as well as the sky dragons. They are to be respected, but can even be interested in humans and their essence.
As the concept moved West, up the Kyber Pass, and out onto the steppes of High Asia, however, much changed from the Hindu beginnings. The weather on the steppe was seldom something thought of as beneficent. Thus, these semi-divine sky creatures became thought of as spirits of destruction and thence, of war. The steppe peoples known as Sarmatians, by the Romans, brought this concept to Europe in their migration, arriving east of Rome in the 2nd Century AD. Their cavalry units were called Dragons, after their sky divines. They taught the Romans just how effective cavalry could be. Some were hired by the Romans, in the campaigns that changed the Roman military from primarily infantry to primarily cavalry by the 4th Century AD. By then many Roman cavalry units were also called Dragons, as a unit type. As the Empire’s wealth declined, these cavalry units became more often supported locally, and on campaign by plunder, because of the higher requirements for grain that the horses caused. Thus, when writers could not directly criticize an imperial general, they could write stories of terrible monsters, that would wind their way over the land, leaving fire and destruction in their wake. This was similar to the patterns of maneuvering cavalry units fighting each other or an enemy. Thus, the legends of dragons as fire-bearing destroyers and pillagers of humans was born. Even the “Red Dragon” of Wales, and the “White Dragon” of the Saxon invaders may have descended from the Sarmatian cavalry regiments stationed behind Hadrian’s Wall as a reaction force against Pictish invasions from the 3rd century AD.
If Tiffany never existed, would she be gone, or would she never have been turned into a female? Either way, removing the curse would affect a lot of people, including the current Narrator. Paradox?
Also, the Collective is the hive mind of the All-Squirrel. 😉
Also also, if Tiffany is never femaled then the Dreamer might finally have to reveal/invent his original name!
OK, I forgot to add that mention that Mackenzie knows about the theory of Branes, so I take that to mean multiverses are possible in this story universe and our Earth has to be one of them, given all the references that have leaked in from our world to here.
http://www.exiern.com/2011/04/05/sugar-crash/
If they ever come to our Earth, they have to visit Denmark (and reward all those loyal readers). The potential is there for no end of fun having to deal with the TSA and customs (some time in California has to be a given for the sheer potential absurdity as well). Then there’s lots of scope for air rage.
As for the large numbers of readers from Denmark, I think I’ve solved that one too. The reason that there’s so many readers from Denmark is because there’s only one Dane that reproduces by cloning and is connected through a collective psychic unconsciousness, all of whose constituent entities like reading the story because that one Dane does.
And that one Dane … is known as the Great Dane.
*boom tish*
(Yanked off stage by a giant hook)
I was thinking that The Collective was the gestalt of the dragons.
I’m suspecting that The Voice is Faden himself – that they made a deal. Or, at least that Alicia THINKS that they did.
Thinking that Alicia’s appearance is based partly on those parts of her that are still fighting the conversion into a dragon. Why else would she still have breasts that are partly covered in scales to give an appearance that they are clothed.
“Why else would she still have breasts that are partly covered in scales to give an appearance that they are clothed.”? Because she shares Princess P-Cups’ penchant for walking around naked.
Mythology lessons notwithstanding, Alicia’s hair all seems to have disappeared, her nose has also disappeared—I haven’t a clue why she would lose her nose—most dragons have ENORMOUS noses. But the breasts—yeah, the only reason to give her breasts is to simplify identifying her as female. The only reason for them to be large is that the artist knows his audience. In truth, human breasts are unusual even compared to other mammals—which all suckle but rarely even show any protrusion try locating the nipples on a bear or (if you’re not used to handling them) a mare. I can just see us trying to explain human breasts to intelligent creatures not-of-Earth. “Ah, so they’re for suckling your young. Then, why do so many human females have silicon bags implanted to imitate protuberant breasts? Are they attempting to entice children away from their birth mothers?”
I think she’s personally blocking out the dragon collective, hiding herself from it. Certainly curious why, though. Alicia was previously shown to not like her changes, but the voice was for it.
I think these explain Alicia’s mind:
http://www.exiern.com/2013/10/22/the-snozberries-taste-like-snozberries/
http://www.exiern.com/2013/10/24/homaju/